Word: glassing
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...history. What does it look like? How does it feel to be in the middle of unimaginable carnage? Safire disposes of such questions in two perfunctory sentences. Then he gets to the important part, a detailed exposition of how photographs are made, circa 1862: "He coated a sheet of glass with collodion, the guncotton dissolved in alcohol and sulphuric ether mixed with a little bromide and iodide of potassium they had compounded the night before...
...hours before dawn one morning last week, a lanky, bearded young man in a rumpled blue jogging outfit dashed into Beirut's luxurious Summerland Hotel, overlooking the Lebanese coast. "I'm Charles Glass. I need a place to hide!" he fairly shouted to a receptionist. A U.S. television journalist who knows the Middle East well, Glass had been seized by Muslim Shi'ite terrorists 62 days earlier in one of Beirut's southern suburbs. Having somehow escaped, he had fled to the right place: the hotel is a heavily guarded sanctuary of Lebanon's Druze community, which is closely aligned...
...receptionist promptly telephoned the Syrian army, which has 7,500 troops on duty in West Beirut, and within an hour Glass was on his way to freedom. What remained unanswered was whether Glass had slipped away from his captors unaided, as he contended, or had been allowed to escape. In either case, Glass had become a pawn in the growing power struggle in Lebanon between Syria, which for its own purposes is trying to restore order and ensure a secular, religiously diverse Lebanon, and Iran, whose fanatical revolutionary rulers are attempting to transform the country into a vessel...
...Glass recounted the story later, the first challenge was to shed his chains. Glass, 36, found that when he made a fist, he could wriggle out of the wrist binding, but the leg chain was trickier. With pieces of thread shredded from his blindfold, Glass bound links of the chain together, and over a period of days fooled his guards into loosening the tether. On the first night that he could pull free, Glass waited until he could hear the snores of his guards. Loosening the chains, he slipped onto the balcony of the high-rise building where...
Along about sundown, the cocktail shakers begin their rumba-like rhythm. Knots of friends and neighbors, English speakers all, gather to gossip or reminisce. Then someone will raise a glass to their common good fortune. After all, not everyone can live in paradise, and not everyone wants...